Buscar este blog

jueves, 26 de octubre de 2017

Catalonia: Secession and Political Left

Three social groups are leading the
secessionist process in Catalonia: the regional public servants of Catalan
speaking background; the (small) entrepreneurs ruined by the 2008 financial
crisis or by the competitive pressure of the common EU market (such as the
father of former regional President Artur Mas); and the conservative rural
middle classes strongly benefitted by the subsidies of Catalan nationalist
governments.

All of them are people of law and
order, not much inclined to political adventures, but their political imaginary
has been penetrating European societies since the radicalisation of neoliberal
politics. It is firmly established within the German right but also in Austria,
Finland, the Netherlands, and the northern regions of Belgium and Italy. Within
this imaginary, the territory is conceived as a strongly cohesive unity in
social, institutional and cultural terms, which needs to fiercely compete against
other territories to achieve positive commercial balances and to attract
investments that will save their welfare systems. Only some radical versions of
this “welfare chauvinism” include an ethnic component, but all of them
encompass an important dose of cultural supremacy, which can evolve into an
extreme right agenda. Southern European countries, but also depressed regions
within their own countries -the East parts of Germany, the Italian
Mezziogiorno, the Valonie in Belgium etc.- are seen as burdens for which rich
regions and nations should not feel responsible, as they want to preserve their
own welfare. The conservative and (neo)liberal section of the Catalan
independence movement envisions reality though this ideological filter: the “Spanish
State” is a cultural artifice, a burden which has to be lifted if they are to
become the “Finland of the Mediterranean”. From here to wanting secession there
is only a small step.

Demanding independence is not a
problem at all for this ideological position, but secession is highly
problematic and even contradictory, if one defends progressive values. The
secessionist left has two branches, but there is a third one, which does not
grow thick enough and is causing political headaches to the leaders of the procés. The first one are the urban,
cultivated middle classes, the old gauche
divine who gave up the social discourse of the 1980’s in exchange for
identity issues. They were organised in the nationalist section of the Catalan
Socialist Party (PSC) until the party blew up some years ago. The second branch
are the radical sons of the conservative middle-classes organised in the CUP (Candidaturas de Unitat Popular), who
defend an ethnic and rural egalitarianism.They are a very active and radical
political group who Puigdemont, the conservative president of the Generalitat, needs to rely on if the
radicalization of the process is to
be preserved.Some members of the popular
and working classes, with no Catalan background, decided to give up their mixed
identity in order to participate in the building of this “Finland of the
Mediterranean”. This group is not important numerically, but immigrants with
full time jobs living in rich European regions have similar ideas, and so do
some trade unions making corporate coalitions with their patrons in order to
defend the competitive positions of their rich territories whose welfare state
benefits their affiliates as tax payers. Without these two and a half branches
of the political left, the secessionist movement would not have more than 25%
support of the Catalan society. Most members of working and popular classes do
not participate in the project. They refuse to be forced to choose between two
identities, or they simply suspect that the snobs of Barcelona and the shopkeepers
of Girona will quickly forget them as soon as they have collected their vote.

The discourse of the secessionist
left cannot easily be made compatible with the ideas of solidarity and justice,
and they appear to be holding escapist positions when it comes to face all the
consequences of their political bet. The “right to decide” can be seen as a
positive issue by those who have a pure Catalan family background. However, for
those with a mixed identity -the majority of Catalans, according to surveys-, this
“right” is perceived as a violent obligation to choose between two identities
artificially constructed as exclusive. If familiar backgrounds, working
experiences and everyday life are culturally more and more mixed in Catalonia, as
they are in the rest of Spain and in world, what is the sense, then, to be
forced to “decide” between one and the other? what is the democratic point of
this process?

The European left criticises the unsolidary
attitudes of European export tigers towards southern European countries whose
productive and export capacities are being destroyed by the German economic
diktat. But this justified criticism is irreconcilable with the refusal of left
Catalan secessionistto support a common
Spanish public social fund and to reject a Spanish federation
reconfigured on social equality grounds, just as they criticize the attitude of
central European elites towards the poorer regions in Europ. Its a sharp ideological contradiction to
engage in Third Word cooperation, to demand economic redistribution from the
big north to the big south but, at the same time, follow the Catalan
conservatives and neoliberals in their will to cancel the solidarity with
poorer Spanish regions.

But the most opaque arguments of the
secessionist left are their refusal to rationally and realistically face the
consequences of their political bet, if the proclamation of independence is done
unilaterally. They refuse to face the political and ideological impact that a
longstanding confrontation and chauvinist reaffirmation will have on the
political and social atmosphere within Catalonia and Spain. Thy refuse to face
the consequences of the economic policies than would have to be implemented if
they were to attract investments, compete with other territories, strengthen
the welfare system, or simply avoid a massive decapitalization. All of these
policies would hit mainly the underprivileged classes, as wages and social
expenses would have to be strongly reduced in order to improvin credit ratings.
They refuse to face the longstanding consequences of “reinvention” of history
and traditions based on the falsification of facts and the accommodation of
others in order to create a new national epic without common democratic
experiences, such as the Second Republic or the long fight against Franco: the
developments in Poland and other eastern European countries are precedents of
contemporary falsification of history which should not be ignored. The left
secessionists and its supporters in the rest of Spain also refuse to face the domino
effect an independent Catalonia would have in the whole country and how it
would affect other Spanish territories: the political dynamics within the Pais
Valencià, the Basque Country, Navarra etc. would be strongly influenced by the
nationalist agenda, swallowing the social agenda in a brief period of time. And
of course they refuse to face the impact of this independence within Europe
itself, where several right-wing nationalist movements would be strongly
encouraged by this turn of events in Spain.

This refusal to face reality affects
mainly the diagnosis of the modern Spanish state. Leftist of all signs criticize
some western countries, which are trying to destroy the territorial integrity
of -mainly laic- states situated in strategic zones of the world, for the
purpose of enforcing neoliberal national building strategies. The fragmentation
of the Spanish State would generate a similar deterioration of public spaces in
and outside Catalonia: the economic, financial and tax competition will be fierce
and Catalonia will be weakened, also due in part to its exit from the European
Union. Spanish anti-statism, the rejection of the state and its rule, has been for years a programmatic
key point within the Spanish left and the Spanish anarchist movement, with a
strong presence in Catalonia. The reasons were structural and justified:
anti-statism was a long lasting response to the Spanish liberal and authoritarian
state of the nineteenth-century, which was extremely insensitive to the needs
of popular classes and systematically used coercion as a tool to face social
and political problems. The “auto determination rights”, which are at the core
or the secessionist project and which can be considered irreconcilable with the
integrity of the Spanish state, were after Wold War I and during the sixties a
leftist response to non legitimate European states repressing cultural
minorities and social and political rights.

It is highly problematic to compare
these repressive states, which were structurally unable to face demands of
democracy and social justice, to the present situation. States are nowadays the
only actors capable of facing the influence of corporations, regulating
financial markets and facing up the security and ecological challenges of the
present world. True: the political pact established with the Francoist forces
during the transition to democracy in the 1980s explains the continuity of
structures, habits and cultures which have been obstructing for years the
possibility of founding a new common identity based on multilingualism and
republican and democratic traditions. But there is a long way from that tension
to identifying the modern democratic Spanish state with tsarist Russia or with
the Franco regime: it would be a major political mistake with unpredictable
consequences for the strategic aims of the Spanish and also of the European
left.

Progressive
citizens, including secessionists, should face these scenarios with courage and
objectivity. Identities are an essential part of political life, but the left
should learn to tighten its grip on them and build dams of rationality for
keeping them under control and divert them for the aims of social
emancipation and justice instead. If not, feelings and identities can trigger
disastrous political dynamics, similar to those we already know from the
European twentieth-century. And it can happen faster than we can react to stop
them.